FootieFox - A Must Have Firefox Addon For Football Fans

Yesterday I came across an addon for Firefox called FootieFox which fills a need I've had for a long time but only had a sorta workaround fix to. As a football (soccer) fan, how do I keep updated on a day / evening of matches that I know are important to me. What I have done and continue to do is listen to BBC Radio 5 Live where they often do a full featured match commentary and get updates from other games as and when events merit it. The downside is that you're reliant on what they choose to cover. Being an English / British broadcaster they do tend to concentrate on English / British games. As a follower of the Barclays Premiership this suits me as far as it goes.

The other habit I've gotten into while at the PC with the commentary on, is to check a latest score page from the Guardian every 10 minutes or so. This is clunky but it works. For some reason I never thought to look for a Firefox addon which would fix this, I was always on the lookout for a new website which was better designed than what I was using. With that, along came a blog post about five Firefox addons for football fans, with four being theming or fantasy football related and the top one being the glorious little bundle of 1's and 0's known as FootieFox. My dreams just came true, although I chose to wait until an afternoon of matches were being played to see it in action rather than just as a static menu of lists. I am not disappointed, not by a long shot. It works just as well as it promises to.

First for those who question football as a world sport this alone should prove that football is the world's number one sport outside the US. The list of leagues available is astonishing. Each country consists of a number of leagues played there, so you can pick and choose individual leagues if you prefer.

The list reminded me of choosing a language or timezone setting when installing a new distro in that it's a huge list to scroll though, which lays out in a very visual form just how many countries have adopted football.

The meat of FootieFox is the ability to quickly navigate through a menu tree to see an entire league's latest scores at a glance which is always up to date. A right click on the status bar icon does this. The status bar can be set to random games, or by selecting any game you want it to stick to. As I'm writing this blog Tottenham Hotspur are playing Manchester United which has provided a chance to snap a quick screenshot of a goal alert which slides in like any notification feature. The goal alerts appear for every game in every league you set it to watch, not just the one you have set on the status bar. The games are only put on a few days in advance of when they are being played, so it's not a season tracker.

It does have an option to see the current status of each league on kicker.de with the click of a button. This appears to vary in functionality with the leagues, so it may or may not be much use to you. Not only that but you can click on a match in the status bar and it'll take you to a more detailed page of stats for that game, also on kicker.de. These pages display for me in German, despite (in my case) I've set my language options for the addon to en-UK. This is not a problem however, and the addon is made and maintained by a couple of (I assume) Germans, who have done an incredible job in providing a very useful program in a very slick and efficient way. The homepage of the project is FootieFox.com. Overall I can't rate this addon high enough. All football fans should make this a must install in every profile they have.